The time change should be made more useful by "springing" forward 25 hours and "falling" back 25 hours. On a Thursday we all move our clocks forward by 25 hours moving us right into the weekend. Then when it is time to fall back we do it on Monday morning givings a second Sunday :p

I can just about remember when I was a child, there was an experimant here in the UK of using Summer Time all thorough the year and it was very hard to get up for school in what felt like the middle of the night.
Apparently the statistics from that period do should an overall reduction in traffic accident deaths but this is probably more due to the fact that drink-driving laws were introduced at about the same time.

I thought folks were getting up in the dark as it is, so I checked, and sunrise was at 7:30am today. Most people who start at 9:00 probably do get a hint of light when they get up, or see light shortly thereafter. This is a good counter argument.

One of the things that influences my opinion is that my time zone is incredibly large. When I went on a trip last month (6 weeks from the shortest day), the sun was setting at 3:30pm! (And I was still a 12 hour drive from the Eastern-most tip of the time zone!)

I can remember that. It was strange going to school in the dark but the upside was being able to sneak into the school building early and hide in a dark but warm classroom rather than shivering outside! Happy days :-)

Take for example a company with offices across three time zones. "Our office hours are 9-5" would become "our office hours are 9-5, 10-6, 11-7 between these dates and 10-6, 11-7, 12-8 the rest of the time".

Then, consider the shift in operating hours of most establishments in the spring and fall. Even if you officially abolish time zones, they're still going to persist unofficially because the chaos that would be caused by leaving it up to each establishment to decide if and when to shift their hours is just too great.

Not at all. If we ALL switched to UTC then office hours would be the same all year round all over the world and you could call anyone from your office without having to wait for them to wake up and get to work. If only we weren't so addicted to sunlight...

While the minimalist, neat freak, wishing-I-lived-in-a-Shinto-shrine part of me agrees completely with anonymous and jdporter, the reality is that most humans aren't like me. Therefore, it is my belief, that even when we have space-based nations, and these space-based nations become economically dominant, the common rustic person on Earth will still use time zones. And, of course, there will be some American-descended space-based nation that refuses to convert to metric time like the rest of the solar system.

What bothers me now however, is why does a new "day" start in the middle of the night? Shouldn't 00:00 be the time when the sun rises during the Spring/Fall equinox?

Midnight or Noon are easy to track when they happen, and are measurable any time of the year. Sunrise varies, so you'd have to accurately track when the equinoxes are, and then accurately measure when sunrise happens, and then have an accurate clock to keep that time for the other 363 days of the year. We've only reliably been able to do that for a couple of hundred years. The definition of 'day' predates that by centuries.

(By the way: In tropical areas, it's not uncommon for the historic 'day' to start at sunrise. Of course, sunrise varies by at most an hour over the course of a year for many of them.)

Huh?...Not sure how losing an hour per day would add up to 5 days so quickly. I think you're saying that every day in February should be 25 hours long, which would make February just under 27 days long. By the time February is over, the clocks will have in effect fallen back a day + a few hours, which would REALLY mess everything up.

In the summertime we get to knock off work an hour earlier ... of course, at that time of day, it's too bloody hot to do anything outside - and by the time it's cool enough to venture outdoors it's bedtime.

Speaking as a professional system administrator and software developer: Whoever invented the darn thing should be hung, drawn and quartered. Repeatedly. Make that a double feature together with whoever came up with leap years and leap seconds.

Most governments would have probably already stopped using what is essentially two time zones in one region - but couldn't because that would be more complicated than just keeping that mess. I think this snippet of BBC's comedy series "Yes, Minister" illustrates it very well how that sort of political thinking works.

Note: Since the clip seemingly was uploaded by BBC itself, i don't think it's any kind of copyright violation to link it here...

If we could get rid of it nationwide, I'd be in favor of that -- provided everyone got at least ten years' notice ahead of time.

However, one thing worse than messing around changing the clocks twice a year is not changing them when everyone else around you does. I went to college in northern Indiana (which does not observe daylight savings), and figuring out timezone issues when communicating with family in Ohio was a royal pain. For part of the year, this configuration actually reversed the logical roles of east and west in determining whose time is ahead of whose. It was confusing and annoying, and we had to stop and think for 30 seconds or more every single time we planned anything involving somebody crossing the border.

Another thing that's worse than changing the clocks twice a year is changing the schedule for changing the clocks, with only a few months' notice. We went through that a few years ago, and it was a nightmare, especially for a network administrator trying to keep track of exactly which systems had the timezone update to make the change correctly on their own, which ones still needed said update, and which ones weren't going to be able to get the update and would have to have their clocks changed manually twice per time change. Hence, I'm against changes to the schedule on short notice. Anything less than ten years is short notice, because systems deployed before the announcement might still be in widespread use.

So, if we're going to move away from DST, we should do it nationwide, all at once, and we should plan the change at least ten years in advance. With those provisos, I'd be very much in favor, because DST is a bit of a nuisance.

For that matter, I'd be in favor of getting rid of timezones entirely and using UTC everywhere -- but again, we'd have to do it (at least) nationwide, all on the same date, and we'd have to plan the switchover WELL in advance.

I don't buy the argument that changing the clocks -- or using timezones for that matter -- gives us daylight at a different time of day. All it does is change what numbers we use to refer to a given time.

DST is an example of creating our own problem, and then having funny solutions to fix it. The problem is that day is defined by the sun, but we try to define it with the 24-hour clock. No wonder we have to patch it twice a year, every year, to keep it working right.

Instead the clock should simply be relative to sunrise/sunset. Then, even the notion of daylight saving would make no sense.

So that would result in hours of varying duration (from, say, winter to summer)? And minutes would get longer at night, in the winter, except at the equator? And would it be a minute or a second or ?? that defines the period from sunrise to sunset north of the Arctic Cirle in the summer?

And how should I calculate my location -- whether with a sextant and slide-rule or with a GPS?
Either is going to have a hard time with definitions of units of time "relative to sunrise/sunset."

Unfortunately in farming communities, it's a necessary evil, like cleaning the toilet or going to Walmart. Hubby is a mild-mannered white-collar worker by day and AutoTrac drivin' farmer by night. That extra hour of light during the summer evenings makes a big difference.

ksublondie,
You have explained why shifting it during the summer is a benefit but not why shifting it back in the winter is also a benefit. In other words, would there be any downside to keeping the time the same year round provided the summer months worked out the way you need?

Shifting it back for the winter gets us back on a schedule more in-lined with the "real world". I'm most thankful that the hubs comes home at a decent time for supper instead of some moronic hour which sets the tone for the rest of the evening.

Yes, it doesn't sound like much of a difference, but shifting 1 daylight hour makes a big difference in getting kids fed, to bed, and up again in the morning for school. Subtle, but kinda huge. Kiddos getting one less hour of sleep? Disaster.

Probably not the reasoning for the original plan, but it's the reason that affects me the most.